“I have a black eye!” I announced, catching sight of myself in the mirror over my dresser when I sat up in bed.
The tiger laughed at me. At least, if tigers could laugh, that’s what this one would be doing. I could just feel it. He padded up to the edge of my bed, rested his enormous head on my spare pillow, and stared at me, and I swear he was grinning. Lou stretched and then climbed over me, sat down in front of Jack, and nonchalantly started to wash her paw. Since his head was bigger than her entire body, this took admirable guts. Or a complete lack of self-preservation. I decided not to worry about it; Jack wasn’t going to eat my cat.
Instead, I looked in the mirror again and winced. He was probably laughing at my bedhead. It was just par for the freaking course that the first time I’d had a hot guy (tiger) in my bed (sort of) in years, I looked like a refugee from a zombie movie.
Except with worse hair.
I pointed to the doorway. “Get. Out.”
He got out. Nobody could say my tiger wasn’t a gentleman.
Standing up wasn’t fun. My head wasn’t pounding as much as it had been the night before, but it was definitely hurting. My face hurt, my neck hurt, even my knee hurt where I’d scraped it, probably when I fell down.
And then there was the black eye. My first-ever shiner. Aunt Ruby would have a cow if she saw me like this.
I took extra care with dressing, as if my black jeans, boots, and lacy white top might take people’s attention away from the sight of my face. Then I picked up my concealer and stood staring at myself for a while, fascinated and horrified in equal measure at the purple and black swelling all around my eye. There was no way my concealer stick was up for this challenge. I put it back down on the counter, unopened. A little hair shine serum and a vigorous brushing later, I gave up on beauty and wandered out to the kitchen to find my one true love—coffee.
Jack was human again, and he was making coffee. I stared at him blearily for a moment before realizing that he was wearing a different shirt than he’d had on the night before.
“Do you always keep fresh clothes with you, in case you have to go pick up injured pawnshop owners?”
He handed me a mug of liquid happiness. “I pull clothes into the shift. I’m not really sure where they come from.”
I put cream in my coffee, pondering that. “So there might be some guy your size running around naked?”
“I doubt it. The clothes always smell fresh. I’d have noticed if they carried the scent of another person,” he said casually, like it was totally normal to sniff-test your magical clothes when they appeared on your body.
Although, I guess for him it was.
I sipped my coffee and looked out my window at the bright Saturday morning, thinking about it. “Hey, this has potential. Can you decide which clothes to conjure up? Like ‘wow, I really need an Armani suit,’ and POOF!”
When I glanced back at him, he was shaking his head, a pained expression on his face. “You are a very strange woman, aren’t you?”
I shrugged, which made my neck hurt, so I stopped. “Has nobody ever asked you this stuff before? How about the issue of the extra size? You must weigh at least twice as much as a tiger as you do as a person. Where does the extra Jack go?”
He started laughing. “Actually, Quinn asked me something similar. She was joking about figuring it out so we could develop a magical shapeshifter weight loss technique.”
Quinn again. I was curious, so I decided to ask. What the heck. He could always refuse to answer me. “Is she your girlfriend?”
His smile faded. “No. She was my partner and my friend, and we saved each other’s lives on more than a few occasions, but we were never more than that. Maybe once there was a… Well. Then that damn Atlantean showed up, and any chance of more was over forever.”
“She’s dating an Atlantean?” This Quinn sounded a little intimidating.
“Dating isn’t exactly the word. Bound for all eternity is more like it. The Atlanteans have an intense idea of love and marriage.”
He drained his coffee cup and poured himself another. “Her sister Riley is now the queen, so it kind of runs in the family.”
“Wow.” Sister-in-law to the king of Atlantis. That was a big difference from pawnshop owner. Part-owner.
Not that I was comparing myself to Quinn. Exactly.
“Breakfast?” Apparently Jack was done talking about his past.
“No, I’m not hungry. I just want to get to work and do normal things for a day,” I said, rinsing my cup and putting it in the sink.
“I have a few errands to run, myself. I’ll drive you to the shop first. What time should I check in on you?”
“You don’t need to check on me at all. I’m a big girl,” I said, trying for a saucy smile.
His forehead furrowed. “Does your face hurt?”
So much for saucy. I sighed and fed Lou, turned off the coffee pot, and headed for the door. “Just take me to work, please.”
After all, I still didn’t look as bad as Fluffy.
“My car’s still here, and it hasn’t been vandalized, so that’s a bright side,” I said, pointing.
“Did you expect it to be?” Jack pulled into the parking lot and practically all the way up to the door. “Curbside service.”
“No. Not really. But I didn’t expect to get beat up in my own parking lot, either.”
Jack’s face, already grim, got darker. “We’ll find him, Tess. I promise you that.”
I nodded, more to make him happy than from any real conviction. Maybe we would. Maybe we wouldn’t. I didn’t really believe in justice these days, and anyway, I kind of never wanted to be within fifty feet of the guy again in my life. I grabbed the door handle, but before I got out of the truck, Jack stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“Be careful today, all right? We’re making somebody nervous, which usually means we’re on the right track, but we know the culprits are willing to kill.”
“I’ll be careful. I’ll be at work all morning and then I’m heading home this afternoon. No outings after dark. No secret meetings in back alleys,” I joked.
Jack didn’t smile. “I’m serious. Also, before you go, can you please search your memory again? Is there anybody else who might have had a grudge against my uncle?”
I was shaking my head before he even stopped talking.
“No. You know how they always say ‘everybody loved him’ but it’s a polite lie? It’s really true about your uncle. Other than Gator, which we’ve already covered, Jeremiah didn’t have problems with anyone. There were people he didn’t really care for, like Walt and Hank and their drinking buddies, but nobody… Wait. There was one incident, but it was more than a year ago, and it was with a vampire, anyway. A vampire would have drained him, not shot him, right?”
Jack shrugged. “Usually. Unless he or she wanted to throw suspicion off.”
“He. His name was Arroyo. One name. He thought Jeremiah had offered him too little on some ‘fang of his enemy’ kind of melodramatic item he wanted to pawn. And this was even though your uncle was nice enough to come in at midnight to meet with Arroyo about it.”
Jack grinned at me. “You sound pretty indignant.”
“I was! There’s no market in vampire fangs, anyway. The people crazy enough to want one usually find other ways than pawnshops to find them, and if a vamp finds you wearing one around your neck, like that guy in Alabama who had a necklace of them…” I shuddered, remembering the news reports of the shreds of clothes and jar of teeth that had been left in a neat arrangement on the man’s bed. Human teeth.
Necklace guy’s teeth.
“Yeah, they tend to take that personally.” Jack ran a contemplative tongue over his teeth. “I wouldn’t appreciate seeing a tiger-tooth necklace either, so I can’t really blame them.”
“Anyway, Arroyo was angry, threatened Jeremiah with a ‘curse upon his house’ and other things I think he got off late-night TV.”
“How long had he been a vampire?”
“Couldn’t have been long, because he still drove his Arroyo Plumbing van to the shop. Jeremiah told me.”
Jack pulled out his phone—to look up the plumbing business, I assumed—so I said goodbye and headed over to open the shop. It might be an odd little place, filled with strange curiosities, but it was my odd little place, and I wasn’t going to let my assailant make me feel uncomfortable there.
“Screw you, Vinegar Boy,” I muttered, putting my key in the door. “You can’t scare me off.”
My phone rang just then, and I jumped about a foot in the air. Okay. Apparently I was just the teensiest bit nervous.
It was Molly. “Hey, what’s up, I thought I’d bring you lunch, what time’s good?”
It wasn’t yet ten, so I’d probably be hungry in a couple of hours. “Noon?”
“Works for me. See you then.”
“I’m looking forward to it. Molly—”
But I was talking to empty air.
Molly was the queen of short phone calls. She had to answer phones all day when she worked at the law office, so she hated talking on the phone in her personal life. I’d wanted to warn her about the black eye, so she didn’t freak out, but she’d just get to see me in all my purple-black-green glory.
I had a steady stream of customers, unusual for a Saturday morning. Within about an hour, I’d redeemed a few pawns (two iPhones and a diamond ring), and taken in a few new ones (a banjo, a chain saw, and an extremely old and ornate family Bible), and sold some signed Jacksonville Jaguars memorabilia to a dedicated football fan. I’d also answered “But how does the other guy look?” twice, reassured three people that no, my boyfriend wasn’t abusing me, and politely declined an offer to “kick his ass.”
Stupid shiner.
I was beyond thrilled to turn the sign to CLOSED when Molly stopped by with sandwiches, at least until she saw my face and dropped the drink carrier on the floor. Ten minutes of explanations (me) and mopping up (both of us) later, we sat at the table in the back and spread out the food.
“Thanks. I skipped breakfast, and I’m starving,” I said, tearing open the wrapping on the meatball sub. I took a deep sniff. “Ah, cheesy goodness.”
She laughed, then bit into her own salami and provolone, extra lettuce, extra Italian dressing. We didn’t do things halfway when it came to sub sandwiches from Lauren’s Deli; it had been a solemn pact between us back when we first got boobs and saw most of our friends turn boy-crazy and start eating only salads “hold the dressing.”
Screw that.
“You only live once, eat extra dressing,” was Molly’s motto. I didn’t have a motto, but if I did, it probably would have something to do with meatballs, sauce, and cheese on home-baked bread.
“How was the crowd last night? I’m sorry I couldn’t make it,” I said, when the hole in my stomach started to fill up.
“Fun. No fights, nobody threw up. Kind of boring for a Friday night.” She fished out another potato chip from our joint bag. “I have to skip out of here pretty quickly to go look at guitars with Dice this afternoon in Orlando. She broke another one.”
I sighed. “Again? Love song gone bad?”
Dice, bass guitarist for Scarlett’s Letters, had a boatload of talent and a problem with serial romances. Every time she dumped her latest true-love-forever, she wrote a song about it and then usually broke the guitar she’d written it with, in an excess of pain and melodrama. This wasn’t a big problem for Dice, whose real name was Veronica Dunstan-Smythe, and who had a BMW and a trust fund, but it involved a lot of guitar shopping for Molly.
I kept suggesting that life would be easier with a different bass player, but Molly said if she wanted easy friends, she would have dumped me years ago.
“So how’s Owen?”
I choked on my chip.
Molly grinned at me. “Going to be hard to explain that shiner, huh? Don’t you have a date with him tonight?”
Crap. I’d forgotten all about it. Which either said a lot about how crazy my life had been lately or a lot about how invested I was in Owen.
“Yes. I should probably text him and tell him I can’t make it. I just don’t have the energy to explain all of this to him,” I said, like a big, fat coward.
“He still doesn’t know about Dead End, or about your I See Dying People whammy, does he?” Molly shook her head. “You have to tell him sometime, if you’re going to keep dating him.”
I’d never seen Molly’s death, a fact for which I was astoundingly grateful. Some things a person really, really didn’t want to see, and I counted my best friend’s death—even in a vision—right up there at the top of the list.
“I know, I know,” I agreed, totally not agreeing but not willing to argue about it. I’m more of a “put it off till tomorrow” person than a confrontational one.
“Okay, babe, gotta bounce,” Molly said, crumpling up the sandwich wrappers into a ball and doing a perfect shot into the trash can across the room.
She hugged me again, making me promise to call her immediately if anything else happened to me, and then she was off to buy another doomed guitar. I turned the sign to OPEN, and then decided to do a little cleaning.
When the bell over the door sounded again, I was surrounded by sparkling glass and the fresh scent of wood polish. Dave Wolf, dressed up in his good jeans and a new flannel shirt, walked in the door.
“Dave! It’s nice to see you. Your mom’s not working till this afternoon, though.”
Dave was one of the nicest guys on the planet, and he’d been blessed with the kind of rugged good looks you’d expect from a cowboy or a guy in an aftershave commercial. Brown hair, brown eyes, tanned skin, and muscles that came from swinging hammers and carrying wooden beams around on the job site all day.
His mother had despaired of him ever settling down with a nice woman and giving her grandchildren—even going so far as to entertain hopes of me catching his interest—until one day a few years back when he’d finally sat her down and explained that he’d much prefer to settle down with a nice man.
She’d looked at him in surprise (Dave had been very private all through school, even at home) and uttered the phrase that lived on in his stories every time he had a few too many beers. “But you’re in construction!”
After that, of course, Eleanor had turned her efforts to finding Dave a nice man. So far, though, the men he’d fallen for hadn’t been all that nice. Luckily, Dave wasn’t one to put up with bad behavior, so he tended to kick that type to the curb pretty quickly. He’d told me once that it was easy to get rid of the jerks and the way-too-emotionally-needy types, because he didn’t want them around his foster son.
After a couple of years as a foster parent, Dave had finalized the adoption process for Zane, and we’d all gone to the courthouse with them to celebrate. Afterward, Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike had hosted a “Welcome, Happy Family” party at their house, and we’d all eaten cake and ice cream until we felt sick. (Or maybe that was just me and Zane.)
These days, Dave and Zane had a great life. They were always going on trips with the church youth group, and Zane played football and baseball and pretty much any sport he could fit into his schedule. I knew all this because Eleanor was the kind of grandma who showed everybody pictures as often as she could trap us in the vault…um…catch our attention.
“Holy crap! What does the other guy look like?” He rushed over to me.
I sighed. “Worse. He looks worse.”
“What happened?”
I really didn’t want to talk about it, but this was Dave. I gave him the brief version.
“That son of a bitch,” Dave said, clenching and unclenching his fists. “If I ever find out who did this to you—”
“You’ll do nothing, because Zane deserves to have a dad who isn’t in jail for assault,” I told him. “Now quit it. I have enough alpha male in my life these days without you going all testosterone poisoned too.”
“Yeah, about that. That’s why I stopped by. I hear Jack is in town. Why isn’t he calling me? Where is he?”
A new voice broke into the conversation. “That a very good question. Where is Mr. Shepherd?”
Startled, I swung around to see Agent Vasquez standing behind us. “How did you get in here? I didn’t hear the bell.”
“I’m P-Ops. We have our ways.”
I rolled my eyes. “Right. Whatever. Dave, this is Agent Vasquez, from the FBI. Agent, this is Dave Wolf, a good friend of mine.”
They shook hands. The agent didn’t try to shake mine again. Apparently he knew better by now, or he just didn’t want to know what his future death might look like.
“What happened to your face?” The agent had quite an intense “scary federal agent” vibe and his accent became more pronounced. “Who hurt you?”
“I ran into a car. I was boxing. A vinegar-soaked thug attacked me.” I smiled brightly, and they both flinched. (I needed to work on my smile, clearly.) “Two truths and a lie.”
Dave shook his head. “So, Agent Vasquez—”
“Dave Wolf, son of Eleanor, father of Zane, master carpenter, boyhood friend to Jack Shepherd,” Vasquez recited. “He hasn’t contacted you?”
Dave folded his arms across his chest and frowned. “Don’t you want to know my shoe size? Or what I had for breakfast?”
“Ten and a half, and waffles or pancakes,” Vasquez said.
“Whoa. Dude,” Dave said slowly, his face turning pale.
Vasquez laughed. “Sorry. Not magic, just good observational skills. Your shoes look like they’re the same size as mine, and you smell like syrup. I just like to play the spooky P-Ops card sometimes.”
I wasn’t buying it. “So, you’re not really spooky?”
“Oh, I’m spooky. In fact, I’m married into a family of witches whose pet basilisks turned my last partner into a stone statue.”
I blew out a breath. “Of course you are. I never would have guessed anything else.”